Abstract
This book brings together essays written by Professor Veluthat over the last twenty-five years. Though heterogeneous in focus, scope and argument, together they make a forceful and compelling argument for the coherence of an early medieval period in the South Indian history. Such an achievement, arising from the work of not only Veluthat, but a handful of other scholars like M.
G. S. Narayanan, R. Champakalakshmi and the late James Heitzman, is far more significant than simply cordoning off an ‘early’ period from a clearly defined ‘medieval’ epoch. South India’s precolonial past in many ways formed an anomaly for the dominant nationalist narratives of ancient and medieval India. In the ancient period, south India could offer up no powerful monarchical state, in the manner of northern India under the Mauryas and Guptas. And in the medieval period, where most historians lamented the politically fragmented and culturally strained condition of north India on the eve of Turkish conquests, historians of south India were faced with an empire of remarkable power and influence. South India in other words, did not fit the overall narrative of ancient and medieval as conceived by nationalist, dynastic historians. So ill-suited were the epochal imperatives of mainstream historical writing to south India that many of its historians (with some notable exceptions), carried on their work with little or no reference to the major challenges to nationalist dynastic history which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s using mostly north Indian materials. So it was, that when Burton Stein came to write his major revision of the Chola state in the late 1970s, his key adversary remained the great dynastic historian Nilakanta Sastri, whose dominance in the field had remained unchallenged since the 1930s. Change, however, was already afoot, and throughout the 1970s and 80s historians like Y. Subbarayalu, M. G. S. Narayanan, N. Karashima, D. N. Jha, and R. Champakalakshmi–most writing from a Marxist standpoint–introduced a major historiographical shift in South Indian historiography. It is in this historiographical environment that Veluthat wrote several of the early essays of this book, essays in many ways flowing from the research connected with his first monograph The Political Structure of Early Medieval South India (Longman, 1993), a meticulously researched and tenaciously argued work which, drawing on materials from both Kerala and Tamilnadu (a formidable combination), set out a critical alternative to the then-popular theory of the ‘segmentary state’. This work, along with the late James Heitzman’s Gifts of Power (1997), remains perhaps the most empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated research monographs to emerge from the feudalism and state formation debates of the 1970s and 1980s. The headiest fruit served at the end of the party
Published some sixteen years later in a substantially changed historiographical environment, The Early Medieval in South India brings together essays that form a kind of chronicle of both continuity and change in historical writing. The book is divided geographically into three parts: essays relating to Tamilakam, Kerala and Karnataka. The first essays of the book, ostensibly on Tamilakam, are concerned largely with issues of land holding, state formation, and local institutions in both Tamilnadu and Kerala in early times. The first essay, Professor Veluthat’s Presidential Address to the Medieval Section of the Indian History Congress in 1997, is a synthetic essay that sets out some of the themes taken up in the subsequent essays of the first section of the book. Here Professor Veluthat puts forth the most compelling argument to date for the transition from the ‘Cankam’ period chieftains to the rise of the great agrarian monarchies of South India–the Pallavas, Pandyas, Cheras and Cholas. He argues that the spread of plough agriculture and wet paddy cultivation, the increasing development of caste stratification, the incorporation of local warrior chiefs and agrarian corporations into the service of nascent monarchies, the growth of non-producing landlord communities and individual landed magnates, the development of a temple oriented Āgāmic religion and its association with bhakti devotionalism–all worked to create the spread of a ‘state society’ across the regions of South India, displacing the kin-oriented chiefdoms of the previous period. These changes, for Veluthat, together formed what may legitimately called the ‘early medieval’ in South India. Along the way are illuminating discussions of the relationship of local institutions (nāṭu) to the state and even on the kali yuga and the so called ‘Kaḷabhra interregnum’.
The influence of B. D. Chattopadhyaya’s formulation of the ‘transition’ to ‘state society’ as an enduring dynamic of the early medieval may be felt here, though in subsequent essays in this section, Veluthat reveals his continuing concern over formative questions of Marxist historical analysis, which have largely dropped from the historian’s purview with the prevalence of models of ‘integrative polity’ and ‘agrarian expansion’. Particularly important is his discussion of labour and produce rent under the Cholas, where he points out that the practice of labour rent (veṭṭi) declined across time in the Chola period with a concomitant rise in the incidence of produce rent (kadamai)—suggesting a change, drawing on Marx’s discussion of the rise of capitalist ground rent in Capital, vol. 3, in relations between rulers and ruled. This is tantalising, indeed, but not laid out in the detail. One wonders how we might conceive of this new found ‘manoeuverability’ more historically–how the peasant experienced his new relation to labour-time, not to mention the possibility of surplus retention ‘behind the back of rent’, and what this might have meant to the shifting relations among a stratified peasantry.
The second section of the book, the longest and most varied, comprises some seven chapters devoted to medieval Kerala, and contains a number of highly informative and important essays. Themes range from the growth and development of Kerala historiography (highlighting particularly the contributions of Elamkulam P. N., Kunjan Pillai and M. G. S. Narayanan) and the role of literacy in the social storage of information to sacred geography and the evolution of regional identity in premodern Kerala. The longest of these essays is on lordship, in which Veluthat argues that the feudalist, integrative, and ‘early state’ (Classen and Skalnik) models–usually seen at odds with one another–actually each have something different to offer the historian of early medieval Kerala. An argument of a number of these essays is that Kerala comes to have a unique regional trajectory and identity, distinguishing itself from the wider identity of Tamilakam, beginning in the period leading up to the ninth century which saw the emergence of the Perumāḷ kingdom based in Mahodayapuram (modern Koṭuṇṇallūr). In a rather prosaically titled essay called ‘Medieval Kerala: State and Society’, Veluthat provides a masterful account of the development of social, political and cultural institutions against the longue durée backdrop of agricultural and commercial expansion and political change in the region. In two brilliant essays, one re-assessing the historical value of the celebrated late medieval chronicle of Kerala known as the Keralotpatti, and the other on the growth of the city of Mahodayapuram as a sacred center, several important but difficult features of Kerala history–the ‘foundation myths’ of Kerala as a land without kṣatriyas, the peculiar configuration of the Nālu Taḷi (four temples) and the reign of the Perumāḷs as the traditional government of the region, and the end of Perumāḷ rule and the reconfiguration of the political landscape into smaller kingdoms–are deftly historicised and fruitfully connected to the evolution of agriculture and brahmanical institutions in the region. These two essays themselves are of great importance, and point to one of the major methodological contributions to emerge from these essays, one that historians of Tamilnadu would do well to learn from–that later medieval ‘mythological’ and literary sources, despite the interpretive challenges they pose, still have much to offer the historian. The relative paucity of inscriptions in Kerala has created the necessity of looking toward other sorts of sources–and Veluthat has done so both sensitively and responsibly.
The final two essays of the collection, marshalled under the title ‘In the Neighborhood’ deal with Kannada epigraphical sources from southern Karnataka. In one essay, published before the more recent work by scholars like R. N. Nandi and M. Adiga, Veluthat calls for a reassessment of the term gāvuḍa in Kannada inscriptions, traditionally rendered as village headman appointed by the state, in light of comparative evidence from Tamil inscriptions from the Kaveri delta. The other essay takes up the institution of vēḷevāḷi, a practice where soldiers took oaths of loyalty to their commanders which involved following them to their deaths. Veluthat once again points to wider regional comparisons in both Tamilnadu and Kerala, noting the growth of ‘fidelity’ and loyalty cults from the ninth century across South India, and suggesting parallels with feudal Europe. These final essays return us to the concerns of Marxist history writing in early medieval India–and though both remain preliminary, they remind us of how much work is yet to be done in this arena, where the epigraphic record is so rich.
The Early Medieval in South India will be necessary reading for early medieval historians, not least because it presents an impressive diversity of themes and topics across a range of medieval South Indian archives–epigraphic and textual, folkloric and classical–in four major languages and three major sub-regions. I know of no other published corpus of a South Indian historian of this generation that can claim such breadth. The oeuvre presented in this volume also marks an enduring concern for traditional questions of Marxist scholarship that have been all but abandoned by the field, it would seem. Yet there is much work to be done here, as the author inspiringly shows. Finally, Professor Veluthat shows medieval historians how later, ‘legendary’ sources, abundant across the subcontinent, can be used fruitfully by historians for both local and longue durée perpsectives.